Part Time Cowboy

“Just looking out for my sister.” And he meant it. Because Kate was too sweet. Too trusting. And Sadie was someone he couldn’t predict. The combination made him nervous.

“Kate stopped by and offered her pickup truck. Because she’s very, very nice.”

“Too nice,” he said, still looking over the items that had spilled out onto the ground. “And you figured you’d unload this all by yourself?”

“Well, the trim isn’t heavy. It’s just unwieldy. But I didn’t realize the guys had packed my bags up against the gate, and they had one tangled in the trim and... Anyway, I had a momentary disaster, and I have a broken pendant light. But it will be okay.”

“I could help.”

“Helping me wouldn’t make you burst into flame?” she asked.

“Depends. Are you planning on lighting something else on fire?”

She let out a growl. “I told you. I did not light anything on fire. I knocked a lantern over. There is a difference.”

“You started a fire. It was an accident, but you did, in fact, light an entire barn on fire.”

“I feel like intent should matter here.”

“All right, then, I intend to help you. Maybe you could stop trying to make everything so difficult and let me get to it.”

* * *

SADIE WATCHED, AND TRIED not to let her mouth hang open, as Eli came closer, shirtless and muscular and just im-damned-possible not to stare at. He had dirt on his chest. His hairy, masculine, muscular chest.

He’d looked so clean in that uniform of his. Like he ironed it directly onto his body so that it would form straight to his physique and never wrinkle. And he looked good in it.

But never had she imagined that there was something so raw and manly underneath it all. He was downright...rough and uncivilized beneath all that law and order.

She suddenly realized she was staring. Pretty much at his nipples. It didn’t get more horrifying than that.

She cleared her throat and looked back up at him. Met his brown eyes, which was the socially acceptable thing to do.

“Thank you,” she said.

And all her good intentions fell like a Jenga tower when he grabbed the middle of the trim and crown molding bundle she was holding and lifted it up, out of her hands, to hoist it over his shoulder.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

Her brain was taking in too much stimulus to compute the exact question. He was standing there, every muscle outlined to perfection by the stance and the weight of the items he was holding. He just looked so damned capable. Standing there and holding things that had been almost impossible for her to manage, like they weren’t anything at all.

Actually, that part was really freaking annoying.

But it looked great. And she couldn’t refrain from letting herself have a little moment. One where she admired the strength in his chest, the sharp, defined lines in his stomach. And down beneath those abs, a perfectly flat plane with deep grooves on either side of it that disappeared beneath the low-slung waistband of his jeans.

She almost had to bite her own fist to keep from whimpering.

What the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t lust after guys she didn’t like. Anymore. Sure, she’d lusted after him—mildly, until he’d arrested her. But she’d grown up since then.

She liked it simple, she liked it happy. She liked nice men who wanted a sweet, easy relationship, and when that wasn’t easily available, she did without.

She’d been without for a while, so she was clearly just having a weak moment on the physical desire front. And hey, that happened. But that didn’t mean she was going to do anything about it. Most especially not with Eli Garrett. No, thank you.

She wasn’t a fling girl anyway. Mainly because the idea of getting naked with a total stranger was not at all appealing. She always got to know a guy before she hopped into bed with him. And getting to know the guy made it not a fling, but a relationship.

And if relationships were not, at present, a happening thing, flings weren’t a happening thing ever. Ergo, sex was not a happening thing for her.

Ergo his abs had just killed 65 percent of her brain cells.

“Just...the porch is good,” she said, walking backward, her eyes still trained on him. She grabbed one of the plastic bags, which was lying, tipped and spilled, on the tailgate, and bent, her eyes still on Eli as he turned and started walking toward the house.

His butt.

Oh, my.

Yep. She’d just crossed over into shameless ogling and she didn’t even care. Didn’t mind even a little bit that she didn’t even like the guy.

Why not look at him for a minute? The fact was, thrills were few and far between for her. Connor might be just as hot. She might ogle him next.

But he wasn’t here. So for now she would just take a moment to note the way the denim cupped Eli’s muscular, rounded...

“So...you gonna nail this up or what?”

It took her a full second to realize “nail this up” wasn’t a euphemism for a sex act.

“The molding?”

“Yes,” he said, setting it down across the porch.

She scrambled to pick everything up, avoiding the broken pendant light and gathering the rest of her odds and ends. “That was the plan. There’s a nail gun in the shed. At least, I think Connor had that on the list. He left me a list.”

“Decent of him.”

“He’s been sort of the invisible man since I arrived. He left instructions, but I haven’t seen him.”

“Yeah, well, he’s like that. Actually—” he bent down to straighten up one of the trim pieces and she cocked her head to the side and watched the muscles on his back shift and bunch “—he didn’t tell me anyone was coming to rent the place.” He straightened. “Let alone signing a long-term lease and spending the next five years running a bed-and-breakfast on my damn property.”

“It’s sort of a shared property. If you want to be technical.” She scurried up toward the porch, her bag in hand.

“Right. So how is it you’re going to install all this? And why are you installing all this?”

“I want the trim to match. Obviously over the years some things were replaced at different times and some of it doesn’t match. The wood in here is beautiful and I don’t want anything detracting from it.”

“But even the replacement molding is older than...we are. It might as well be original.”

“Well, no, it might as well not be, because if it were, it would match. It gets accolades for age but I’m still replacing it.”

“So you’re going to put this cheap-ass stuff in there?”